This is a disappointing release. The Swedish Chamber Orchestra certainly plays with world-class skill, but conductor Béla Drahos underplays the music to the point of nullity. The best performance is Symphony No. 51, where the orchestra’s excellent horn and oboe players tackle the work’s challenges with aplomb. The two horns in particular distinguish themselves in the loony highs (and lows) of the inner movements. Symphony No. 50 features some nicely turned string playing in the finale, but the timpani are almost totally inaudible and the trumpets are well covered by the high-register (c-alto) horns. The slow movement also is incredibly insensitive, being uniformly too loud and unvarying in dynamics.
Drahos also manages to subvert the intensity of one of Haydn’s very greatest “Sturm und Drang” creations: Symphony No. 52 in C minor. Playing the opening bars crescendo is a cute idea, but Haydn marks them “forte” with accents, and the music needs all of the intensity and guts that the conductor can wring from it. In the finale Drahos shows himself to be very much a “conductor from the first violin part”, failing to clarify the shifting rhythmic patterns below the music’s surface and sacrificing much dramatic tension in the process. Reasonably present but less than ideally clear recorded sound further muddies the proceedings. Given the talent on display, this should have been much better.
